Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The concept of the adaptive landscape
- 2 Modelling natural selection in adaptive landscapes
- 3 Modelling evolutionary phenomena in adaptive landscapes
- 4 The concept of the theoretical morphospace
- 5 Analysing the role of adaptive evolution in theoretical morphospaces
- 6 Analysing evolutionary phenomena in theoretical morphospaces
- 7 Evolutionary constraint in theoretical morphospace
- 8 Evolutionary development in theoretical morphospace
- 9 There is much to be done …
- References
- Index
2 - Modelling natural selection in adaptive landscapes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The concept of the adaptive landscape
- 2 Modelling natural selection in adaptive landscapes
- 3 Modelling evolutionary phenomena in adaptive landscapes
- 4 The concept of the theoretical morphospace
- 5 Analysing the role of adaptive evolution in theoretical morphospaces
- 6 Analysing evolutionary phenomena in theoretical morphospaces
- 7 Evolutionary constraint in theoretical morphospace
- 8 Evolutionary development in theoretical morphospace
- 9 There is much to be done …
- References
- Index
Summary
‘Wedges in the economy of nature’ wrote Darwin in his diary, leaving us with a glimpse of his own first glimpse of natural selection … Later biologists, by the fourth decade of the twentieth century, would invent the image of an adaptive landscape whose peaks represent the highly fit forms, and see evolution as the struggle of populations of organisms driven by mutation, recombination, and selection, to climb toward those high peaks. Life is a high-country adventure.
Kauffman (1995, p. 149)Visualizing natural selection
We have seen in the last chapter that an adaptive landscape is a way of visualizing the evolution of life in terms of the geometry of the spatial relationships one finds in a landscape, where the landscape consists of adaptive hills and valleys. If we use the theory of natural selection to model evolution within an adaptive landscape, we saw that natural selection will operate to move a population up the slope of an adaptive peak, from lower degrees of adaptation to higher degrees of adaptation.
What happens, however, when an evolving population reaches the top of an adaptive peak? Or what happens if an evolving population encounters two peaks in an adaptive landscape, rather than one? Clearly natural selection will operate in different ways at different times in the evolution of any group of organisms, depending upon the environmental and ecological context within which that group of organisms is evolving.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Geometry of EvolutionAdaptive Landscapes and Theoretical Morphospaces, pp. 6 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006